Catheters are used with stents and inflatable structures to treat conditions such as strictures, stenoses, and narrowing in various parts of the body. Various catheter designs have been developed for the dilatation of stenoses and to deliver and deploy stents at treatment sites within the body. Stents are typically intraluminally placed by a catheter within a vein, artery, or other tubular shaped body organ for treating conditions such as, for example, occlusions, stenoses, aneurysms, dissections, or weakened, diseased, or abnormally dilated vessels or vessel walls, by expanding the vessels or by reinforcing the vessel walls. Once delivered, the stents can be expanded using one or more inflatable members such as balloons. Stents can improve angioplasty results by preventing elastic recoil and remodeling of the vessel wall and treating dissections in blood vessel walls caused by balloon angioplasty of coronary arteries. Stents can also be used as a drug delivery medium for treatment of damaged portions of a vessel.
While conventional stent technology is relatively well developed, stent technologies related to treatment of the region of a vessel bifurcation are still being developed. One challenge related to treatment of a vessel bifurcation involves treating with a stent the area of the vessel bifurcation surrounding the ostium into a branch vessel. Multiple guidewires systems have been used to treat a vessel bifurcation to help align features of the stent delivery system relative to the branch vessel. Because of the complexity of aligning multiple guide wires within a tortuous system, single wire systems are preferred. However, single wire systems and even many multiple wire systems require advancing a guidewire through the struts of a deployed stent to obtain access into the branch vessel. Systems and methods that address these and other challenges related to treating vessel bifurcation would be an advance in the art.